This article focuses on reforms in gwedish higher education since the 1970s. It asks whether and, if so, how, these reforms affected women. Though the reform movement succeeded in bringing more of them into the university, women are still segregated into predominantly female fields. This segregation in higher education translates into occupational segregation in the workforce. The second half of the study asks why the reforms have failed to equalize men's and women's education and life-chances. Through the life history approach, the author finds that Swedish reforms proceeded on the basis of "rational efficiency" models which have little to do with how women make educational and work decisions. The author argues that in order for equalization to occur, the task will be to reform higher education in a way that matches rational efficiency with human sensibility. This article focusses on Swedish educational reforms during a period of rational planning and on the impact of these reforms on women's life patterns. The framework is set by two quotations.
"It was with something of a new spirit that western education moved into the 1970s... It was to be an education more open to innovation, more accepting of dissent, more capable of providing for all needs and all tastes in a life-long education within the learning society of the future where rational efficiency was to be matched with human sensibility." (Connell, 1980).
How have the extensive Swedish educational reforms, carried out during Connell's "period of reconstruction and expansion 1945-1975", taken women's needs into consideration? Has the reform been able to match "rational efficiency" with "human sensibility?" The article will discuss how far-reaching the Swedish reforms were in terms of goals of rational efficiency and at the same time consider from a woman's perspective the extent to which human sensibility was taken into account.
The second quotation is taken from a section on the idea and reality underlying educational reform in higher education in the report of a project financed by HSFR, The Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences 1979-1983, and consists of a Swedish woman's summary of her educational and vocational life story.